


no prayers nor bells

by Full_Of_Grace



Series: For Doomed Youth [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War I, Angst, F/F, Gen, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:46:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26864611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Full_Of_Grace/pseuds/Full_Of_Grace
Summary: "It makes Veronica feel childish and pathetic to need help. She’s so grateful for it she can barely breathe. A terrible knot of feelings that she cannot describe rises in her chest, and she’s afraid it will turn into hatefulness in her mouth, so says nothing."Archie is missing in action while fighting in World War I, and Veronica struggles at home.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Veronica Lodge, Betty Cooper/Veronica Lodge
Series: For Doomed Youth [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1959817
Comments: 14
Kudos: 34





	no prayers nor bells

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to my substantially shorter Jughead centric fic also set during WWI. While this fic can probably stand on its own, I do recommend reading the first one.
> 
> Warnings for: technically ambiguous but very heavily implied major character death, pregnancy, child loss, and some body issues stuff.

She is supposed to name the baby Fred. That’s what Archie and she decided on in their letters, so that’s what she’s supposed to call him. An honorific for a dead father, both tragic and charming at once. The trouble is, things have changed since they made that agreement. Veronica wonders if she ought to name the baby after its own dead father instead.

If Veronica’s mother were here she would tell her not to call Archie dead. “Missing in action,” she’d say, in her most reassuring voice. But Veronica is not a stupid woman, and its been a month since she received that first letter. If he was just missing they would have found him by now. Luckily her mother isn’t here. It is just Veronica and the other Mrs Andrews in the clean kitchen of the family house this morning. The two of them perched like a pair of mourning doves at the table.

Veronica still has trouble looking Mary Andrews in the eyes. They hadn’t been terribly close before Archie shipped out, though they lived in the same house. In the hollow months since his leaving they’ve been bound together first by terror and now by greif. They sit together. They do not speak.

That’s why it’s a surprise when Mary clears her throat and sets her cup of tea aside. “I’ve been thinking,” she begins, and a thousand thoughts flitter through Veronica’s head. Mary is going to throw her out, Mary hates her, Mary can’t bear to have her here when Archie is gone, Mary is going to send her back to her father–

“Thinking, or wondering, I suppose. I wonder if he wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t for his father.” Mary says, and picks up the tea again. 

Veronica’s shoulders loosen. Not about her, not at all. About  _ him _ , and there is only one him they ever discuss. 

“Perhaps,” Veronica says, just a beat later than she should. “maybe, yes, that makes sense.” 

And it does make sense, in a way. Last year had been a blur. War was announced two weeks before their wedding, then came the draft that Archie was exempt from, that snatched up all the men their age that didn’t have dependent families or college courses or new wives. Betty and Jughead’s thrown together nuptials. And then, in the quiet stretch after the draft boys had shipped out– Fred’s accident, sudden as a German sniper's bullet. Archie had enlisted a month later.

They could have been connected. If there was anyone who could have talked Archie out of being a hero, it was his father. But beneath that thought is a darker one, bitter as poison. Why couldn’t Veronica? 

“Or if he knew about the baby, of course.” Mary adds.

“Of course.” Veronica mutters into her own tea, suddenly unappetising. The baby. For a few minutes she’d left her own body, forgotten her unexpected little passenger. Two weeks after he’d left, that’s when she’d gone to the doctor and found out. If he had waited just a little longer– but that’s all that thought is, if-if-if. Pathetic. 

“I’m sorry,” Mary’s voice is very gentle, motherly in a way that unsettles Veronica, “I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

And here she was thinking it was Mary who didn’t want to talk. Veronica keeps staring at her tea. “It’s alright.” 

It bites at her the rest of the day, the idea of talking about it. At two she decides to go to the Jones’s house, and doesn’t bother calling ahead. Betty and Jughead don’t entertain, are rarely at the office, and Betty always lets her in.

The Jones’s house is made of five small rooms all crowded uncomfortably close to each other. It’s a respectable home for a newly-wed couple, the sort of place she and Archie considered before Fred died and it became clear they weren’t moving out, but it’s little. Veronica is unused to little houses, even now. At home– no, at her parents house– there were two floors and a wing, and you could spend days without seeing anybody.

But Pembrooke House is the largest building in town, part of the life she’s abandoned, and she shouldn’t be thinking of it here, in Betty and Jughead’s neat little parlor. Betty has made her tea.

Veronica has drunk more tea in the past six months than she had her whole life previously. She prefers coffee and fruit-juice and milk and liquor, but the doctor has warned her off all of those. Only water and tea and tomato soup for the baby, and Veronica hates tomato soup. 

She takes a few polite sips before setting the cup down on its saucer. “How are you?” she asks.

“God, we’re alright.” Betty sighs a little. “Jughead is working on his novel, so I’ve been doing a few more of his assignments from the paper.” 

Veronica’s mouth twists in disgust. The Riverdale register has four men on staff, but ‘Jughead Jones’ writes nearly half the articles. Of those, most are actually written by Jughead Jones’s wife. Veronica was sure Betty’s parents would credit her if she asked, but Betty insisted it was easier that way. Perhaps she liked being anonymous. 

“But how are  _ you _ ?” Betty prods, an expression that looks too much like pity in her eyes. Jughead is absent, cooped up in his office down the house’s narrow hallway. It seems like they can never have real conversations with Jughead there.

No need to delay. “I’ve been thinking about why he left. What would have kept him from leaving. A million little what-ifs.” 

“Oh,” Betty says immediately, “oh Ron, it isn’t your fault.”

“I know it isn’t my fault!” Veronica snaps, then goes to take a sip of tea. She hates how their conversations are now, brittle and painful and liable to break into pieces. She wants her easy highschool friendship back. She wants highschool back. “Just a matter of timing. If only he’d waited a little longer, or if I’d had to go to the doctor sooner. I was talking about it with Mary this morning.”

“How is Mary?” Betty is grasping for another subject. This is not another subject. 

“Alright, under the circumstances.”

“Of course. Under the circumstances.”

They are quiet after that. Veronica is not in the Jones’s parlor. She is imagining life if Archie had waited a few more weeks and had found out about the baby. He would be at home even now, arranging something for the construction company, squinting over papers. After she came back he would make a joke about Betty’s awful cooking, and he’d wrap his arms around her and her stomach, cradling her and the baby. They’d curl up like some sort of recursive fetus. He would still be there, if he’d waited.

But while Veronica’s been dreaming Betty has stayed firmly in place. Undeterred, she asks another question. “Have you heard from Reggie since the first letter?” 

Veronica laughs despite herself. “Yes. He offered to marry me when he gets back.” It would have seemed callous from anyone else, but Veronica knows he meant well. That blunt and inconsiderate suggestion– he wanted to take care of her, not just as a girl he’d dated for a month in highschool, but as his dead friend’s wife, the mother of his dead friend's child.

Betty’s eyebrows shoot up. “And are you considering… saying yes?”

“I don’t know.” She knows she shouldn’t give it a second thought. It’s too soon, it’s vulgar of her. But it’s a tempting offer. She doesn’t love Reggie, but she loves security. She loves the idea of not going back to her father. She knows that eventually, if she doesn’t remarry, she’ll have to go back to her father. But–

“I might.” She says finally, a non answer that Betty only nods at. “I don’t want to leave Mary alone in that house. Not so soon.” 

“Things will be different by the time the war ends, I suppose.” Betty takes a sip of her own tea. “You’ll probably have the baby. And, I mean, he hasn’t been… missing in action is only…” she goes back to the tea again.

Veronica wants to scream. Not this, not from Betty, her sensible Betty. She had thought they’d made a silent agreement not to discuss anything as foolish as hope. 

The room is very quiet, Betty unwilling to finish her sentence, Veronica unwilling to respond. The silence makes Veronica feel unstable, unmoored. 

“About the baby,” she says finally “I was wondering if you’d drive me to the doctor’s on Friday. I have another appointment.” Last time, Mary took her, and it was unbearable.

“Yes, of course I will.” Betty smiles for the first time that day. “If you want me to.”

It’s nice to have Betty there at the doctor’s, unobtrusive as she is, sitting prim in the chair and reading a novel. The doctor buzzes around Veronica with the speed and the spectacled eyes of a peculiar insect, and she’s glad there isn’t anyone else fussing over her.

The doctor peers in her eyes and her throat, gives her a new list of foods she must not consume, and presses a stethoscope to her belly, checking for the miniscule heartbeat that Veronica’s been subsumed by these past few months. Veronica sits very still, lifts her limbs when she’s told, and tries to ignore how large she is now, how awkward. 

Here is the wretched truth of it all: she hates this. She hates being unbalanced when she stands up, the unexpected aches in every part of her body, the twitching joints, the swollen breasts, the exhaustion. She hates feeling like her body is not her own.

  
At some point, she thinks, it should have started feeling worth it. It’s been six months to the day since she first found out, and she is still sick and hateful about the whole ordeal. She doesn’t resent the baby. She’s just detached from it. There is no connection between the destruction of her own body and the child she will be receiving in a few months time. Part of her still can’t help but imagine the stork, flying down and dropping a bundle in her hands.

If Archie had stayed it would be different, she’s sure. If, if, if.

The doctor lets her listen to the heartbeat through the stethoscope. She hunches over herself and tries not to breathe. There, tiny underneath the other sounds of her body. Ba-bum. She ought to feel something. Here is a miracle inside of her. Here is her last, greatest link to Archie. She feels tired. 

Betty drives her home. She is quiet for a while, in the front seat of the Ford, eyes fixed squarely on the road in front of her. A few months ago, they might have been talking and laughing. Veronica pokes at the wound. 

“What are you thinking about?”

“Huh?” Betty looks over at her. “Nothing much. Babies. My mother– ever since Polly had her fourth, my mother keeps making suggestive comments. ‘You’re married now sweetheart, I’ve been wondering sweetheart.’ It gets on my nerves. But everyone our age is having babies. You’re having a baby.”

“Under less than ideal circumstances.” It kills the conversation. But what was Betty expecting? A cheerful exchange about procreation and matrimony? It was an insensitive thing to say, so Veronica gave an insensitive response. Fair’s fair. 

And it’s a terrible thing to imagine, Betty ballooning up with Jughead’s child, confined to house slippers and banned from drinking fruit juice. Veronica pictures far more for Betty. The way she used to picture far more for herself. 

But that was the choice she made, the great escape: to be out from her father’s thumb she had to be under another man’s. And there was no better man than Archie. She’d had fewer prospects, marrying down, but she’d been sure she’d be happy in Riverdale. It’s not a bad town, really. It had good people. Still does, though less of them.

Betty pulls the car in front of the Andrews house. Stops and gets out and goes around the car to let Veronica out, like she’s a princess or a movie star and Betty is a gentleman. Veronica looks her right in the eyes for what might be the first time that day. She can’t read Betty’s expression– still and blue-green like the ocean in Florida. She’d visited once as a child. She remembers the beaches, the wool bathing-dress she wore, her mother’s hair whipping out of it’s coiffe.

How has Veronica let herself become such a creature of nostalgia? She catches up to the present only when they reach the front door. 

“Thank you.” She tells Betty, and she means it, she really does.

“You’re welcome.” A tightness to her beautiful face. “Look, Ronnie, I’m sorry.” 

Veronica only nods, and Betty turns and goes back to the car and she can’t leave, she can’t leave Veronica here on the porch alone with herself and the weight of herself and “wait!”

Betty turns again. Blinks. 

“You should come in. Get something to eat. We can make an afternoon of it.” Veronica hopes she doesn’t sound desperate. 

Betty smiles at her and nods, so quickly it’s as if her neck has snapped. “Yes, an afternoon! Just let me take the car back– I think Jughead said he’d be needing it later. I’ll be back.”

And Veronica waits in the parlor for her. Mary Andrews is out volunteering with the women’s homefront association, so Veronica can sprawl out on the couch with no fear of anybody coming in and seeing her. She can be ugly, for a moment, loose and bloated and wriggling like a fish to find the most comfortable position for her back. 

Betty rings the doorbell after twenty minutes, and Veronica gets up to smooth her dress and let her in. The low sun turns her golden hair into a halo. It could be Saint Cecilia herself at Veronica’s doorway. 

In the living room, Veronica sits on the couch again, ankles crossed and back straight. Betty sits in the chair Archie’s grandfather carved in the 1880s, the one with uneven legs no one ever bothered to fix. She wobbles slightly, and laughs. The sound breaks the tension in the air, shortens the distance between them.

Veronica is sick of tension. She’s sick of being distant from her own body, distant from life, distant from Betty. They used to laugh so easily. In highschool, they’d stay up all night talking about everything and nothing at all.

“What are you reading?” Veronica asks. “I saw you at the doctors office. New book, brown cover?”

Betty seems surprised she noticed. “Oh, it’s  _ My Ántonia _ . It’s a new book by Willa Cather, this prairie woman author. I don’t know if you remember, Jughead loved  _ The Song of the Lark _ .”

Veronica does not keep track of Jugheads reading material. She nods anyway. “Is it any good?”

“Yes. It’s spectacular. It’s set out in Nebraska, it’s about this Bohemian girl and it’s all from the view of the boy who loves her. He loved her his whole life, but of course they can’t be together, she winds up marrying somebody else. But he’ll still always have that time when they were kids, you know? That sort of love, you can’t get rid of it.”

Betty looks very ashamed, suddenly, and Veronica knows she is thinking of Archie. Betty’s parents still live right across the street. When they were children, long before Veronica’s father had even thought of moving his family to Riverdale, Betty and Archie had seemed the perfect match. Pretty protestant children, just the same age, both pale and sweet as milk.

“I wish I grew up here. It would have been fun to know everybody as children.” Veronica says eventually.

“I don’t know about that,” Betty says, “I think Jughead would have pulled on your braids.”

Veronica laughs in surprise. Betty must hate the heaviness too, the quiet that devours their discussions. 

“He seems like he was an off putting child.”

“You don’t know half of it.” Betty says, terribly dramatic.

“But really. Riverdale might not be the Nebraska prairies, but it seems just as idyllic. A gentler childhood than New York City was.”

“I’d rather have the city. More happens in the city.”

“All people do in the city is save up enough money to take trips to the country.” Veronica wrinkles her nose up. She does miss the city, but she doesn’t want Betty to miss it for her.

They’re talking like they used to, easy and laughing, and it’s so good Veronica feels like she might burst. That halo of sunlight has wrapped itself around her. She hasn’t felt this warm in months. 

She barely notices how quickly the time slips away until Mary is back from the women’s group, bustling through the door and making a gentle noise of surprise when she sees the unexpected guest. 

“Oh, it’s late, I should go.” Betty says, but Mary insists that she stay for dinner. The three of them eat lamb split into small portions, and talk very politely. Afterward, Mary excuses herself and retires to her room, and Betty and Veronica are alone once more.

They move to the living room and talk more for a long time, about everything and nothing, and then sit in companionable silence. It’s reassuring, Veronica thinks, that this afternoon might have changed something, that even their quiet can be good again.

The grandfather clock in the hall chimes, nine deep  _ ding-dong _ s rattling through the empty air. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to head back now.” Veronica says reluctantly, like a child with a playdate cut short.

“Oh,” Betty says, and then twists her hands in her lap, “you know, I was actually thinking– it’s so late. I might just stay the night. If that’s alright?”

“Perfectly alright,” Veronica says, “only won’t your husband miss you?”

“He knows where I am.” Betty shrugs. “He sleeps in his office half the time anyway. Falls asleep at the desk. He won’t miss me.” 

“Ah.” Veronica says delicately. She’d sensed unhappiness in the Jones’s house on her visits there, but had never considered that. 

The Andrews house has no guest room, so they go upstairs to the second bedroom. Mary had offered her and Archie the master after Fred’s passing, but Archie had refused. Veronica certainly wasn’t moving now. 

Veronica flushes when they arrive there. It looks like a sickbed– bed unmade and sheets rumpled. The shelves are cluttered; half Veronica’s books and half Archie’s old sports memorabilia, trinkets and photos he collected when he was young. Betty doesn’t say anything about it, so she doesn’t either.

“It’ll be like we’re kids again,” Betty says cheerfully, and she’s already slipping off her shoes. Veronica busies herself with unlacing her own boots, then peeling off her stockings and skirt and blouse and petticoats, folding them as neatly as she can and piling them in the corner. It takes her too long with her awkward, swollen body, and by the time she’s put her petticoats up Betty is already down to her chemise, watching Veronica with the same impassible expression she had at the car this afternoon.

Veronica works at trying to unlace her maternity corset, but with the lacings on both sides and her fingers fat and clumsy, it takes her much longer than usual. She huffs in frustration.

“Let me help,” Betty murmurs, and she is beside her suddenly, unwinding the left side while Veronica works at the right. Betty is very quick and very gentle and she taps a finger softly on Veronica’s waist once she’s done. Veronica does not look at her the whole time. She cannot look at her. 

It makes Veronica feel childish and pathetic to need help. She’s so grateful for it she can barely breathe. A terrible knot of feelings that she cannot describe rises in her chest, and she’s afraid it will turn into hatefulness in her mouth, so says nothing. She finishes with the right side, and folds it with the rest of her garments.

“Thank you,” she says, still not looking, and does not see Betty nod in reply.

They slip into the bed like two school girls, Betty blowing out the last candle. Veronica curls up in the strange position she’s found it easiest to sleep in these past months, and it is only then that she realizes that Betty is where Archie would be. Should be.

Betty must know it too. She doesn’t say anything but “goodnight.” 

Betty doesn’t fall asleep quickly, Veronica knows from years of sleepovers, but after only a few minutes she is breathing evenly, and Veronica feels alone once more. Archie always snored.

I want, she thinks, I want, I want, I want. She is not sure what she wants. This has always been her plague, desire with no focus and no end. Her poor little baby, she thinks, wriggling like an insect in her bed, trying to appease it. It wants too. 

I want, she thinks. To be held, perhaps. To be a little girl again. She moves her leg so that her ankle touches Betty’s.

In the morning she has almost fallen off the bed, and though she tries to be quiet in getting up and washing her face, Betty stirs blearily awake as she’s dressing. The light from the window turns her into a painting. 

“Good morning,” she says.

“It’s Wednesday,” Veronica answers, all conversational skill abandoning her. It is Wednesday, after all. 

They wear yesterday's clothing and comb their hair and eat breakfast, Mary commenting on how she would have prepared more if she’d known they’d had an overnight guest.

Betty gives Mary a goodbye kiss and dons her hat, and Veronica leads her out to the porch. “You ought to come over more,” she says. She can say things like that on the porch, in the doorway, in liminal space. Everything is more honest. “You can stay the night again, if you want. We don’t get many visitors.” 

“Yes,” Betty says “of course.” And then she goes home.

Veronica rushes back to her room with only a few polite words thrown at Mary, then sits on her bed with her face in her hands. Betty pities her. She must. Veronica has made herself pitiful– the lonely half-widow, still waiting on that final confirmation from the army. She had practically begged for pity on the doorstep.

She wants to throw herself onto the corner of the bed until she vomits the infant out of her. The infant in her belly and the infant in her heart, the ones that scream “love me, love me, love me” like every other fatherless child.

Betty does love her, she reminds herself. Even if there is pity, there also must be love.

Veronica is not sure she ever had a friend before Betty. There were girls in the city whose parents knew her parents, girls at her boarding school, girls with whom she would share her baby-secrets and go to department stores. But Betty, her first and dearest of her Riverdale friends, was different. Their connection had never been reliant on her father’s money or on casual cruelty. Betty seemed to honestly, earnestly like her. 

She thinks of that first day, sophomore year, when Veronica had introduced herself and said they ought to be friends. Betty had laughed and rolled her eyes and let her eat lunch with her anyways. They’d had their fights, but they’d drifted back to each other.

Her father told her once that she was a fundamentally unlikeable person. That on her own, without the trappings of his name and his money she wouldn’t have anybody at all. Her marriage would end in disaster, and she’d have to come crawling back. Like so many things her father said, she isn’t sure if he meant it. It doesn’t matter. Here, at the end of all things, she has at least one person left. One person to untie her laces, to talk about nothing, to stay through the night. 

She lifts up her head and catches her balance. She looks at the bulging shape of herself in the long mirror and wipes her eyes. Two people, maybe.

They fall into a routine, Betty and Veronica, as the latter enters confinement. Betty comes over four days a week and sometimes brings food, her own cooking which Veronica will pretend is delicious, or at the very least tolerable. Mary is gone more often than not, throwing herself into volunteer work with a desperate ferocity, so they are often left to their own devices, playing rummy and knitting and reading books. Betty lends her the copy of  _ My Ántonia _ and Veronica reads it in three days.

Veronica’s time at rest is punctuated by charitable visits by all manner of other friends. Once they recover from their terrors and remember politeness, processions come to pay Veronica their respects. Cheryl and Toni and Midge and Ethyl and Josie and almost every other girl from her highschool class, most with their own men in France, offering gentle sympathies and hand sewn baby clothes. Even her mother comes over once, stiff backed and misty eyed and so much smaller than Veronica remembers her being. But nobody visits more than once but Betty. Nobody stays the night but Betty.

That’s part of the routine, unspoken. If she stays past dinner she doesn’t intend to go home. Veronica wonders if this is a little like what it would be to have a sister. Sharing meals, sharing beds. So sure of there being someone beside you. It’s a little like what it is to be married, from the months Veronica knew what that was. 

Usually they’re quiet once they go upstairs, but some nights they play sleepover and whisper past midnight. Often it’s about nothing in particular– a continuation of the day's chatter painfully unserious. Sometimes the stillness of the room is a doorway.

“This isn’t how I thought it would be like.” Betty says one night, and Veronica is too tired to turn the whole of herself over to face her. She wants to face her. Instead she reaches an arm awkwardly behind her, and feels Betty grab her hand. 

“How it would be like?” Veronica says, half into the pillow. She hopes Betty can hear her.

“Growing up.” Betty sighs, long and quiet. “Being a person. I don’t know what I thought. I’m not unhappy. I’m so lucky– I’m awful, for complaining to you. I knew precisely what I was getting into. I guess I just thought it’d be easier. Being married, working for the paper, doing… I don’t know. I was so frightened I’d turn into my mother. I swore I’d be nothing like my mother. I did exactly what she told me not to do. But now I am like her, anyway, even though I tried not to be.” 

“I’m sorry.” Veronica says. There’s nothing else to say.

“God, no, Ron, I’m sorry. I’m being pathetic. You’ve been through– the unimaginable, and you’re so strong. I wish I could be like you.” A pause. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant–”

“I know.” She doesn’t, not exactly. They are quiet for a long time. Betty takes her hand away, and Veronica wonders if this is the end of the conversation.

“When I was kid everybody thought I was going to marry Archie. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” Betty’s voice sounds like it’s going to split in half. “I’ve been wondering if that would have been better.”

“Did you love him?” Veronica asks. This is not something they’re supposed to talk about.

“Of course I loved him. He’s– he’s impossible not to love. You know that. He could crack one joke and change your whole day. He’d make your world brighter.”

“He makes you want to be better than you are.” 

“Exactly. But I don’t know if we would have been happy together. I don’t know if I could be a good wife for him. I’m not a very good wife for Jughead.”

“You can’t cook.” Veronica should say something else, should be angry at this whole line of hypotheticals. But she isn’t. She’s too tired to be angry, maybe, or too sad. 

“It’s true!” Betty laughs, wet and disgusting. “I can’t cook!” Veronica can hear her wiping her face in her hands, and her heart swells in repulsion and tenderness. 

“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I hadn’t married him.” Veronica says, finally. “He’d still be gone, but I wouldn’t live in this house. And I wouldn’t have the… you know. I don’t know if it’d be better or worse.”

“I suppose we’re all doomed to wonder about that kind of thing.” 

“I suppose.” Veronica says, and Betty grabs her hand once more.

Early next morning, when the light through the curtains is barely beginning to gray, Betty has an arm thrown over Veronica’s body and has her face pressed into the back of Veronica’s neck. Veronica does not move for what might be an hour but is likely much less time, feeling warm breath rush right against her ear, before Betty rolls away in her sleep. 

The day is lazy after Betty leaves, as most of Veronica’s days are now. She doesn’t bother putting on anything but her chemise and her stockings, sure she’ll have no visitors. The doctor tells her she is only a month away from delivery, and has grown so large she is dizzy looking at herself in the mirror. 

It’s Saturday, which means no women’s clubs or church for Mary, so they pass a few hours in the living room, stabbing at embroidery wheels and occasionally sharing a few comments. Mary has many vulgar and amusing things to say about other women in her circle. Veronica likes to hear her be rude. It makes her seem more human.

In the afternoon, overcome with the exhaustion that sets upon her more days than not, Veronica goes up to her bedroom for a nap. She wakes up dying. 

There is something very wrong. There is something very wrong with her body. She hurts so bad she can’t breathe, and her heart has been torn out of her chest. She falls out of the bed and crawls out of her room to the landing, and is only aware that she’s screaming when Mary is suddenly running up the steps, and saying something Veronica can’t hear.

Somehow she gets down the stairs and out of the door and into the Model T, Mary frantic and shaking in starting the car. Something starts leaking down Veronica’s legs when they’re halfway to the doctor’s house, but she can’t bend to see what it is. Mary must see, though, because she starts crying, and when they get to where the doctor’s house is she keeps going.

Mary is driving, Veronica thinks vaguely, to the county hospital. Then she stops thinking of anything but pain.

She is aware again for only a moment, in a white room she doesn’t know. There are people talking very quickly, and it’s so hot she’d swear she’s melting, and it hurts so bad, it hurts.

“I want my mother,” she says, but she’s not sure if anybody hears her. “I need my mother! Where’s my mother? Momma? Mamá, mamá, please.”

_ Veronica is in a green-blue lake. She swims for miles and never wonders why she can’t breathe. The water is foggy in a way that doesn’t frighten her, but she can’t remember which direction is up. For once, it is fine to be unsure. She thinks she might be looking for something, but she hasn’t found it yet.  _

_ She is in a field full of poppies that grow as tall as her waist. She’s slimmer than she can ever remember being, but she tries to run and her legs are made of lead. When she touches the flowers her fingertips bleed. _

_ She is in the church in New York City where she had her confirmation, a year before the move. The pews are empty and standing near the altar is Saint Cecilia, her hair as yellow as the corn-fed American Dream. What do you want, the holy lady asks with her beautiful eyes, my love, what is it that you want? _

_ She is in the sports field at Riverdale Highschool. She is looking at the moon. As she stares, it seems to get smaller and smaller. She wonders if it’s running away from her. _

_ She is in a passenger car of a train going so fast she can’t see anything through the windows but smears of color. Across from her is her husband, only for some reason he won’t look at her. She begs and she wails until he turns, and his face is a blur.  _

_ She is in a place that does not exist, and there is a woman shrouded in dark cloth. The woman is cradling a wailing thing that must be an infant close to her chest. She nurses it. As she shifts the baby from her breast, her robes fall away, and Veronica can see that something has torn open her chest. _

When Veronica wakes, it takes her a while to remember how to be inside of her body. Her head and her throat ache the way they did when she had fevers as a child. She is hollowed out and unbearably tired. She wants to go back to sleep, but then notices where she is. 

The hospital room is yellow-white and dingy, lit with an electric light suspended from the ceiling. Veronica is on a stiff low bed with her head propped up. And in the corner of the room, half asleep in a chair, is her mother. 

It is so strange to see her mother this way, with her face unpowdered and her hair coming loose. When Veronica pushes herself to sit up, she can’t bring herself to say anything, just to see her in repose a few moments more. 

She doesn’t have to say anything. Her mother has noticed Veronica’s movement and leaps from her chair, across the room in an instant. She throws her arms around her and begins speaking so quickly Veronica can’t understand her, bits and pieces of thankful prayers to saints she can’t catch the names of.

“Mamá,” Veronica rasps, “mamá, I can’t remember. I went to the hospital?”

“We thought you were going to die. You weren’t talking for two days afterward, just groaning and sweating, your fever–” she presses a hand to Veronica’s forehead. “Oh mija, my sweet girl.”

Veronica allows herself to relax into her mother’s embrace for the first time in… how long has it been? A hundred years, a thousand? Did their primordial souls cling to each other before the business of earth tore them apart? It doesn’t matter. She rests there, breathes, for ten seconds, then twenty, letting her mother wet the hospital gown with her tears.

But there is something pushing at the back of Veronica’s mind, not letting her live in this moment. A horrible, impossible thought. 

“I’m better, mamá, I was sick but I’m better, stop crying.” Hermione does not follow her direction. Veronica whispers questions into her mother's hair. “You said I was gone for days. Where did they take the baby?”

At last her mother draws away. “Oh sweetheart,” she says, and her eyes well up once more.

Veronica can’t hear anything but the sound of her own heartbeat. She is still dreaming, surely. She is back on the bed in her husband’s house. But no, says that little voice in the back of her mind, you are not a stupid woman, you understand.

“–two and a half hours.” Veronica’s mother is still talking, “She was too small, she was so tiny, and she didn’t even cry. Just these awful little gasping sounds. The doctors tried so hard, but they couldn’t do anything. They let me hold her. They would have let you, but you were insensible. I’m so sorry, mija, I’m so–”

“I thought it was going to be a boy.” Veronica says. She’s not sure why this seems important. Everything has gone wrong.

“Darling,” her mother says, “we all thought a lot of things.” She pauses for a second. “I drove to the hospital as soon as Mary called me. You were laboring then and still were for three hours before it finished. You were bleeding so much, and then the poor baby…”

“Was daddy here? Did he see me?”

“Your father was at a meeting in the city, and we just couldn’t get a hold of him for a while. But he came yesterday, for a little while. He never saw her. The doctor said the worst was over for you, so he went home. He was so worried, mija, he truly was. I could call him again, if you want to see him.”

“No,” Veronica says, “I know he’s busy.”

“I’d asked for the hospital chaplain to come up, that first night,” her mother continues. “For your last rites, just in case. When we saw she wouldn’t make it, I told him to baptise her. I didn’t know what you wanted for a baby girl, so I just said my mother’s name. And then he saved her.” She sniffles. “She’s safe.”

“That’s good to know,” Veronica says. “That’s so good.” It is only then she begins to cry. 

It’s not fair, she thinks, again and again. When she is released from the hospital a few days later and starts taking wobbling steps again, when she arrives back at the Andrews house, with it’s cheerful yellow walls and steep gables, when she lies down in the too big bed upstairs; not fair, not fair, not fair.

Her father would describe this as a childish complaint. “Life’s not fair,” he’d say, and he’d be right. Millions of infants have died worse than that, with no grandmother’s or priests to help them along. She pictures the fields of limbo, speckled with wailing babies, forever distant from god. Like a field in France, gray and eternal and lonely. Not fair, she thinks again, it’s not fair that she’s here and her husband is not and her baby is dead and she is in this yellow house, trying to remember how to exist in a body alone.

Mary avoids her, which seems the sensible thing. They dine together but do not speak. Once, she asks Veronica gently if she wants to give the baby a name for the family plot. Veronica says just Baby Andrews is alright. That’s what it says on the certificate, after all. Baby Andrews, died August 28th, age two and a half hours. 

She gets notes of sympathy and a few visitors. Cheryl Blossom’s frosty facade cracks for a moment of genuine pity to slip through. Veronica wishes it hadn’t. Grief has abandoned her for anger, that reoccuring whine in the back of her mind–  _ why me _ ? Other, luckier people make her want to spit.

It’s two weeks before Betty comes to see her, in the evening right after dinner, wearing a pressed green dress and carrying a large bouquet. “From Jughead,” she explains while putting the flowers down, then she takes Veronica’s hands in her own. “Ronnie, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No, I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t come to the hospital, even.”

“Nobody expected you too.” Veronica tries to remove her hands, but Betty squeezes tighter.

“I mean it. I mean it. I should have been with you.”

“I had my mother.” Veronica isn’t sure why she’s arguing. Maybe because she knows that she did want Betty there. Maybe because she knows that’s an absurd thing to have wanted.

“I’m going to stay the night.” Betty says, and there is no trace of a question in her voice. 

It still feels odd, to be small again, though she’s still swollen up with extra pounds that the doctor says are perfectly normal. She’s gotten used to sleeping a certain way. But when Betty slips into the side of the bed that is half Archie’s and half hers, Veronica lays down to face her. 

They haven’t blown out the candle yet, and Betty’s face seems to shudder in the flickering light. Unreal. Honest in its falsity. 

“I keep thinking it must be my fault,” Veronica says, all in a rush. “Because I didn’t want it. Because I resented it. I kept thinking ‘why am I stuck with this, how will I raise it, what will become of me?’ And now– I didn’t want it! So I didn’t get–” and she is crying again, for the first time since the hospital, weeping pathetically, twisting her hands into knots. She feels sick saying it because it is true.

And Betty has moved closer, too close to see, and she is whispering things. “It’s not your fault, of course it’s not your fault.” She kisses Veronica’s forehead like a teacher, and kisses Veronica’s cheeks like a saint. She is trying to kiss the tears from Veronica’s eyes, and it makes her cry harder and turn away. 

She still has her head pressed into the pillow when Betty blows the candle out. She waits for Betty’s breath to even out before turning back around. She can only see the barest lines of Betty’s face in the moonlight that comes in from the window. It’s a good face. She’s missed it.

“When I heard you were dying I didn’t know what to do.” Betty says, not asleep after all. “I heard the news and the first thing I thought was ‘there’s going to be nothing left for me.’ I have a husband and a job and a house and a family and I thought– nothing left. A husband I love– or try to love, who tries to love me. But at that moment I thought: this is the end of the world. First Archie and now Veronica and what the fuck am I going to do. I think that’s common, I think that’s–”

“Catastrophe,” Veronica says. 

“Yeah, catastrophe. We think it’s the end of things even if it’s not.” Betty is trying to give a brave and triumphant speech, she’s trying to seem inspiring, she’s trying to rouse Veronica from the pits of despair. But her voice is still pitchy and frantic.

Veronica says “I was the end of your world?”

“Of course you were.”

And because she is tired, and she is sick, and she wants and wants and she has spent this whole wretched year losing everything, Veronica kisses her on the mouth. It’s not good. It’s wet and clumsy and unpleasant. Betty kisses her back. 

“I think you’d be the end of mine.” Veronica says, and Betty kisses her again. It’s better this time. Veronica thinks vaguely of Jughead down the block and Archie’s body in France and her wisp of a child in heaven. She is monstrous for this. Perhaps she has always been monstrous.

“You can’t ever leave me,” Veronica says. It’s not the sort of promise she can make.

“Never,” Betty says anyways. Veronica will believe her for now. It’s a threshold. It’s the end of the world.

Veronica dreams of a green-blue lake. She is lost, she is searching, she is surrounded by the vastness of nothing. When she wakes up, she is alone in the bed, and Betty is lacing up her dress.


End file.
